Dec 31, 2013

The post title says it all: there will be no more posts on Editorial Explanations from this point forward. The end of a year -- and, possibly, the beginning of another year, an election year, when the cartoons will get nasty and rude and personal for months on end -- seemed to be the perfect time to do that, and so it is.

Editorial Explanations, like most things, never quite lived up to its own image of itself -- you can see my second anniversary post, from last February, for the fullest explanation of what EE was intended to be, and how it didn't always live up to that -- but it was fun to do all of the time for quite a while, and then fun to do much of the time during and since the 2012 election. So I don't regret it.

But editorial cartoons are an arguably dying artform, and there are fewer cartoonists working than even when I started this blog in February of 2011 (and that was well after the first big wave of newspaper closures and layoffs and consolidations). As the field tightens, the scope for the kind of work that I really wanted to showcase here -- the local cartoonist for the Podunk Herald, doing a lazy cartoon about a dead famous person, or about a news story in a country he knows only cliches about -- shrinks and narrows until it has basically disappeared.

There are still bad editorial cartoons out there: they appear every day. But they are mostly deliberately bad cartoons these days, that take the opposite of the facts and turn that into propaganda to score points for a particular political team. I've spent more time on those deliberately bad cartoons than I've wanted to -- they are my own particular tar baby -- but it's time now to walk away.

Perhaps this is a case of Gresham's Law, but I don't think so: there's still also great cartoons almost every day. And the same cartoonists who do a deliberately bad cartoon one day can go a great one the next day -- I found myself laughing at an A.F. Branco cartoon only a week or so ago, showing that even our newest and most tendentious cartoonists can break out of the scoring-points mold now and again.

So I hope the few of you that read this blog will continue to read editorial cartoons: at their best, they crystallize complicated ideas and situations into a visual metaphor that can make us look at the world differently. And, yes, at their worst, they're purely cheerleading for their "team," mostly in the form of taunts about the opposing team. But every artform has both best and worst: that's what makes them art.

But you'll have to find those cartoons elsewhere -- I suggest my three major sources, AAEC, GoComics, and Cagle. And you'll have them without my snarky commentary...which may well be a plus.

Dec 26, 2013

The problem with the modern Republican party is that they haven't been adamant enough in opposing everything Obama does. If only they'd been a little more recalcitrant, they would actually have accomplished making sure nothing got done.

Varvel wants to use today's political cartoon to heavy-handedly enforce conformity to your local hegemonic religion. I'm sure, if he were cartooning from Baghdad, both he and his audience would have no problem with a similar cartoon praising Muhammad at Eid.

Admittedly, the drawing is excellent, but since a political cartoon is supposed to be a) about politics and b) contain humor, there's no way to consider this a success in its chosen medium.

This is one of the rare political Rorschach test cartoons -- what you think it means will depend on what you already believe.

Is it....

A: That the new budget agreement will hurt the taxpayers of this great nation, with all of its weasel-worded "fee increases."

Or...

b: That the new budget will hurt the poorest and weakest in society, by failing, once again, to create any substantial jobs programs, increase the minimum wage, fix the social safety net, or do any of those other things Democrats love so much.

The greatest threat to the health of the American public is a government board empowered to make minor changes to Medicare payments -- not anything to do with individuals directly -- that can be overruled by Congress.

It's certainly not the actual boards at actual insurance companies that make actual decisions to deny care to actual people, causing actual deaths. Not actually.

Dec 16, 2013

It's vastly worse to be vaguely in the company of teenage singer Miley Cyrus than actually in the company of despots and mass murderers Adolf Hitler (1938), Josef Stalin (1939), and Ayatollah Komeini (1979).

This is because men killing people is honest, while young women acting out sexual activities in public is, and always will be, utterly scandalous.

Dec 5, 2013

That's right: the alternative to healthcare is "cut taxes, cut spending." Because a smaller government magically makes people healthier by spending less on clean water, clean air, unadulterated food, firefighting, roads, and national security -- not even counting delivering healthcare.

Dec 3, 2013

Oh, no! This family now has healthcare! If they get sick, they'll be treated by doctors! They won't have lifetime limits! They might even be hospitalized if they need it, and not be bankrupted by the cost!

Nov 29, 2013

Every other political stripe -- from the Spartacist League to the John Birch Society -- is made up of sane, reasonable, thoughtful adults, and only the Tea Party is a collective child, to be exiled to the kitchen.